The 2016 Shortlist is announced!

The shortlist for the 2016 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has been announced! The six books are:

SWEET CARESS by William Boyd (Bloomsbury)

A PLACE CALLED WINTER by Patrick Gale (Tinder Press)

MRS ENGELS by Gavin McCrea (Scribe UK)

END GAMES IN BORDEAUX by Allan Massie (Quartet)

TIGHTROPE by Simon Mawer (Little,Brown)

SALT CREEK by Lucy Treloar (Picador Australia)

Announcing the shortlist, the Judges said:

“Each place in our shortlist was hard fought, as it has been another exceptional year for historical fiction. This embarrassment of riches forced us to focus our lens more closely on fiction which evokes an authentic atmosphere of the past, rather than that which solely deals with the nature of memory.

“The six books we have chosen are certainly evocative – transporting us from the Great Northern prairies to the South Australian coast, via a wide sweep across pre-war and post-war Europe – but they also tell great stories, and bring periods of history alive, much as Walter Scott did in his time.”